Automating

This episode covers the Test Automation Pyramid, created by Mike Cohn in 2008-2009 in the book “Succeeding With Agile”. We will go beyond the diagram and look at the model that supports it. Then deep dive into the model to explore it’s meaning in relation to Automated Execution Coverage, not Testing.

TLDR; Automating Strategically is hard. Sometimes we need to work tactically and learn, before we move forward. Sometimes we automate for ourselves so that we benefit, before attempting to automate for the project.

TLDR; Historically we modelled testing as something that we wanted to automate, but the tools didn’t help, so we automated entity management and that has led to a mistaken view of “Test Automation” instead of “Automatization as part of a software development and testing process”.

• Why do we talk about Test Automation the way we do?
• Why do we talk about 100% Test Automation?
• How do we model automation as part of our Test Process?
• How does Testing provide information?
• Why was a Waterfall Test Process Different from an Agile Process?
• Why, in reality, both processes are fundamentally the same.
• How we modelled “Test Automation” incorrectly, and an alternative way to model it.

All this and more…

TLDR; Mix and match different abstraction layers and Objects to create the architecture you need to support your automated execution activities to support clarity and ease of development.

I found a postit note on my desk. I can’t remember when I drew it but it seems to have been an attempt to group different levels of abstractions used when automating, in this case automating a Web GUI.

TLDR; When you learn to manipulate the DOM with JavaScript you can create simple tools and automate from within the browser and use bookmarklets to make the code easy to execute and sync across different machines.

TLDR; Frameworks implement an abstraction layer so we don’t have to bother about it. But, what if the implementation is doing stuff you don’t want? How do you know? Find tools that let you observe inside. WebPageTest.org does that for web pages.

TLDR; I migrated blogs over to Hugo and I didn’t automate because I was only doing it once, I should have automated because I actually migrated 450+ times (at least once per post. Find results at testerhq.com

TLDR; Where to test? Can you isolate the functionality? If so, test the isolation most heavily. Then look to see what integrates, and how it integrates. Then test the integration as heavily as the ‘how’ requires.